In this paper, we mainly investigate upper semicontinuity and regularity of attractors for nonclassical diffusion equations with perturbed parameters ν and the nonlinear term f satisfying the polynomial growth of arbitrary order $p-1$
p
−
1
($p \geq 2$
p
≥
2
). We extend the asymptotic a priori estimate method (see (Wang et al. in Appl. Math. Comput. 240:51–61, 2014)) to verify asymptotic compactness and upper semicontinuity of a family of semigroups for autonomous dynamical systems (see Theorems 2.2 and 2.3). By using the new operator decomposition method, we construct asymptotic contractive function and obtain the upper semicontinuity for our problem, which generalizes the results obtained in (Wang et al. in Appl. Math. Comput. 240:51–61, 2014). In particular, the regularity of global attractors is obtained, which extends and improves some results in (Xie et al. in J. Funct. Spaces 2016:5340489, 2016; Xie et al. in Nonlinear Anal. 31:23–37, 2016).